Review of The Hunted

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Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro star in this suspenseful but routine action-thriller from master filmmaker William Friedkin.

By Scott B.

The Hunted is a movie that turns out to be a good deal better than it had any right to be (or that its dreadful trailers suggested it would be), mostly because of a pair of very fine central performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro, as well as top-notch direction by the hit-and-miss but still legendary William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection).

That The Hunted is actually a pretty effective pop piece, ranking alongside Friedkin's previous picture Rules of Engagement as some of his best work in years, is a very pleasant surprise. But the pleasure I took in this taut yet conventional film was tinged by a bit of melancholy: The realization that the William Friedkin of 20-to-25 years ago &#Array; who, after the twin hits of The French Connection and The Exorcist, made a handful of obsessive, unsettling, and challenging thrillers that didn't do well at the box-office but stand to this day as some of the weirdest big-budget, mainstream films ever released &#Array; could have probably made The Hunted something close to a masterpiece (like Sorcerer or To Live and Die in L.A.) or at least a fascinating failure (like Cruising or even his little-seen death-penalty drama Rampage). But the William Friedkin of 2003, marking the beginning of his fourth decade as a film director (he started in documentaries in 1962), just seems to be happy to be working with a solid budget, acclaimed stars, and studio backing on a project in the thematic ballpark of his interests.

Still, I don't mean this review to sound like a eulogy for William Friedkin's career. His two most recent films do showcase an assured director nurturing a new thematic obsession, after several years of films like The Guardian, Blue Chips and Jade that were stylistically unfocused and bereft of much meaning or frisson (though I do have a tiny guilty-pleasure soft spot for the deliriously sleazy and pretentious Joe-Eszterhas-by-way-of-Bunuel erotic thriller Jade). If The French Connection, Cruising, and To Live and Die in L.A. stand as Friedkin's thematic trilogy about the blurred lines between cops and criminals, then Rules of Engagement and The Hunted are linked as dual meditations on the moral and psychological price paid by soldiers. A timely issue, no question, with American troops still in Afghanistan, and readying for possible war with Iraq.

On the surface, the screenplay &#Array; by David and Peter Griffiths (writers of the delayed-by-9/11 Schwarzenegger revenge thriller Collateral Damage) and Art Monterastelli &#Array; appears to be a riff on the First Blood recipe: Take a decent veteran tipped into madness by PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) who unleashes his lethal skills on the civilian population; bring in the man who trained him; throw in some law-enforcement types who don't know what they're dealing with; let it unspool at breakneck pace for just over ninety minutes.

Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro in The Hunted

It's not quite First Blood in the details, but the general outlines are close enough. The atrocities of Kosovo substitute for the POW camp of Vietnam. Stallone's Rambo has become Del Toro's Aaron Hallam. Richard Crenna's Colonel Trautman is now Tommy Lee Jones as L.T. Bonham, a tracker and teacher of lethal arts (who, interestingly, has never been in combat himself nor killed a man). First Blood's tough sheriff (Brian Dennehy) and inept small-town police force morph into The Hunted's FBI team, headed by the too-beautiful-to-believe-as-law-enforcement Connie Nielson of Gladiator (I do admit that Ms. Nielson is certainly easier on the eyes than Mr. Dennehy). It is to the credit of Friedkin and his writers, however, that The Hunted can have this many similarities with such a well-known previous film and still maintain its own identity. Where First Blood was primarily set in the forest, The Hunted only starts its chase there and then moves swiftly into the urban jungle of Portland for its second half.

Another strength of the film is its quintessentially Friedkinesque blurring of protagonist and antagonist. The first half of the film places audience sympathies firmly with the Tommy Lee Jones character, as he desperately tries to apprehend his wayward pupil Del Toro. But, halfway through, a certain series of revelations paint Del Toro's situation very differently &#Array; as well as presenting the Jones character in a more complicit and conflicted light. Interestingly this duplicates an effect from David Morrell's original novel First Blood, dropped from the film version, where chapters alternate between Rambo's POV and the Sheriff's until the reader isn't entirely sure who the protagonist is supposed to be. The gambit pays off beautifully for Friedkin (mostly due to the actors) and it's one of the strongest, most interesting aspects of The Hunted, even though it's not elaborated nearly enough.

So what we're left with, beyond echoes and hints of deeper meaning, is the primary reason this movie was made, which is the action material. From gruesome knife-kills to punishing hand-to-hand combat to a patented Friedkin car chase, the pyrotechnics and stunts are superb. The film's only real misstep in that department is during its climax, where rushed plotting, confusing editing, and a couple of glaring continuity errors suggest that a much more complex and lengthy sequence was planned to wrap the film up only to be whittled down to some shakily-connected basic elements.

I don't want in any way to suggest that The Hunted is a bad film. If the fact that it's not more than good, however, is something of a disappointment, it's because we know what Friedkin is capable of doing at his best (and sometimes at his worst). The provocative, controversial, occasionally excessive William Friedkin of yore &#Array; who upset general audiences with the grotesqueries of The Exorcist back in 1973 before completely baffling those same audiences with the costly flop that was his follow-up, an existential art film in the guise of an action picture called Sorcerer, in 1977 &#Array; probably would have been very interested in making The Hunted, even then; it certainly has many of his basic themes. I just don't think he would have made it in such an unquestionably capable but ultimately conventional way.